Christopher Hitchens's Unacknowledged Legislation

...As a critic, he champions complexity—of Philip Larkin he says, "He was an artist and a thwarted fascist," which sentence is itself a fine statement of (liberal) belief...

...There is courage in Hitchens's loneliness, DISSENT / Summer 2001 n III BOOKS but the cost has been high...

...Consider the legacy of such as [I...

...One can only be reticent for so long, however, and Hitchens isn't...

...not a self-hating Jew, he was, at Oxford, an accommodating one, apparently embarrassed by leftwing coreligionists like Isaac Deutscher and Noam Chomsky...

...Well," says Hitchens, at last...

...Sometimes, it's true, he is unfair...

...but his spirit hovered nearby...

...In the right margin, someone has commented, sniffily: "Fellow traveler McDonald neatly overlooks Comrade Stalin's purges, where 2 x 10' peopledied...

...And, practically rubbing his hands, after a juicy extract from Isaiah Berlin: "Where to begin...

...To wit: "my old friend Sidney Blumenthal...

...Was Christopher Hitchens involved...

...There is, in this collection, a lovely essay about The Great Gatsby, on the occasion (a savvy reviewer will always find one) of its seventy-fifth birthday...

...To this poll-tested capitulation Hitchens counterposes a form of leftist moralism...

...He is like Norman Mailer, sizing up the men in the room...

...Halfway down page 39, in a 1945 essay called "The Responsibility of Peoples," Macdonald argues that the Nazi death camps were uniquely anti-human...

...He is everywhere, perpetually arguing...

...Driving up from Cape Cod, 0 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS the two must pull over frequently for "the many powerful drinks and the huge uneaten meal without which the Hitch could not long subsist...

...Writing of Bellow's Ravelstein, a novel about Allan Bloom, he objects to Bellow's suggestion that Ravelstein/Bloom had a death-bed conversion: "Say what you will about the Straussians, they aren't hypocrites or weaklings and they don't burble about heavenly rewards to make up for when the mind has gone...

...When forced to relate an honorable act, Hitchens seems petulant: "Berlin, normally so eager to please, was later to refuse to shake Menachem Begin's hand when he met him in the lift of the King David Hotel...

...A thing that you have to read," says Hitchens, mostly in earnest, "if you desire to know what's cooking in the culture, is the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association...

...Wondered the wise old Bellow: "How d'you feel now...

...This has the effect, at times, of implying that the world's problems can be traced to the private neuroses of a few powerful individuals (whom Hitchens has met at Vogue parties...

...Fellow traveler McDonald," it said, "had been denouncing Stalin for over a decade...

...Dinner has long since been consumed...

...He is, of course, right...

...Clinton's personal behavior is a matter of some concern to him, as is the point, in his recent Harper's argument for Henry Kissinger's arrest, that Doctor K's manners are "rather gross" and his wit "secondhand...

...his voice—his haughty, urgent, brilliant voice—has grown hoarse...

...Yes, Podhoretz...

...Pure coincidence: the symbol meant nothing sinister at the time...

...but surely life, and the depiction of life in art, and the organization of life in politics, are moral acts, and must be written about as such...

...It translates through feeble poll questions into stupid poll answers, but it is this: In the past eight years, he has jettisoned something unquantifiable that, once lost, cannot be redeemed...

...We must be able to do better than that...

...There really is something of Chambers in him--the self-dramatization, the either/or thinking, and above all the merciless faith in ideas...

...Bloom should have been allowed this last nobility...

...for sometimes, in the end, your blood is right...

...Throughout the trip Amis implores his old friend not to pick a fight with the neoconservative Bellow...

...Yet there is no question that his political opponents have received the best of him...

...What a question...

...I am quite ready," he said recently, "to be angry and boring and humorless...

...I would not say that he's declined, but he has become angrier...

...no one speaks...

...If once in this country there was a Big Lie (maybe two), there are now hundreds of little lies, scattered across dozens of periodicals...

...A clear rout for the forces of truth—even if, as is no doubt the case, the moral idiot of the first comment never returned to get what was coming to him...

...There are political problems, too: In rejecting the bankrupt doctrine of the "lesser evil," Hitchens has fallen into the arms of the bankrupt and quasi-messianic doctrine of the "long view...

...He has gone a little stir crazy, on this marginal chariot...

...Fellow traveler 'McDonald,'" yet another student had added beneath this, "is spelled wrong...

...Despite his pledge, our man does not let us down...

...we certainly must do better than that—and yet there is an important sense in which we can't...

...Hitchens remarks the peculiar darkness lurking around the novel's edges: It gives one quite a turn to find Meyer Wolfsheim, he with molars for cufflinks, hidden Shylock-like behind the address of the "Swastika Holding Company...

...If what Hitchens finally manages to assemble before dismissing Berlin as "a skilled ventriloquist for other thinkers" is merely a thick dossier of circumstantial evidence, a volley of grapeshot from the margins, the general conception is clear enough: to Hitchens, Berlin represents that class of realist thinkers, the "it's-more-complicated-than-that" crowd, whose compromises have gutted the Western left...

...Hitchens rides shotgun...

...I'm sorry if I went on a bit...

...This is, by my informal count, Hitchens's fifth contribution to the venerable subgenre of the anti-Podhoretz essay...

...He is as scabrously funny as ever—"As a literary critic, [Podhoretz] rather resembles an undertaker scanning the obits for trade"—but at this point one has to wonder whether there is a compelling reason, intellectually speaking, to continue engaging a reactionary whom Hitchens himself has nominated as "the most unscrupulous man of letters of our time...

...112 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...

...F.] Stone, Nader, Chomsky, Cockburn: endless engagements with current deceits causing or threatening immediate suffering to a great many actual people...

...He has put his manhood and self-respect into a blind trust, and he can't recover it...

...In his new collection of literary criticism, there are a few meandering essays, but for the most part the pieces are sharply polemical, responding to the pressures of specific literarypolitical moments—accusations against T. S. Eliot ("Was T. S. Eliot an anti-Semite...

...he is not less funny, but he is increasingly unamused...

...Writing as quickly as he does, he makes frequent errors, so that you feel he should have with him two burly fact-checkers, as others have bodyguards...

...The fulminations against Bill Clinton collected in No One Left to Lie To are directed as much at Clinton's apologists, or dupes, as at the president himself—the book could well be subtitled Le Milisme des Clercs...

...Hitchens may yet escape this fate—no one since Dwight Macdonald has been so scathingly funny...

...When he submitted an affidavit to Congress controverting the sworn testimony of Clinton adviser and his old friend Blumenthal, it was, I think, the result of a principled decision, but one that placed political beliefs above the claims of friendship...

...The key word here is sacrifice—not to put too fine a point on it, but Hitchens has read a whole lot of crap...

...Probably not...

...Begin he does...

...attacks on George Orwell and the Spanish syndicalists...

...In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis tells the story of bringing Hitchens to Vermont to meet Bellow...

...it's as if mad Americahad hurt him into prolificacy...

...His disdain is, all in all, rather monotonous: Hitchens on presidents is like Nabokov on writers—the times change, but the insults are the same...

...He has ceded some of his nobler positions and has begun to speak of "liberal au thoritarianism"—a strange cliché to hear from a man who's done so much to ridicule the myth of the "liberal media...

...TO LOOK AT a page of Hitchens from afar is to see an impressive amount of quoted material, as though he were giving his opponent due consideration...

...There is reticence here, and gentle irony, and the spirit of Gatsby is allowed to inhabit the spaces between the lines...

...0 ONE ELSE writes like this...

...Hitchens is unconnected, somehow, to his subjects...

...Surely a mind as fierce and agile as his must be bored by another memoir from the Ford administration, and yet just as surely his cultural and political marginalia is a necessary thing...

...The Berlin essay is the longest and most exemplary specimen here—one is reminded, reading it, of Lenin's counsel about wiping your opponent from the face of the earth...

...It might tell you, for example, that a president of shoddy moral character and enervated social policy who nonetheless maintains a commitment to the powerless is still closer to you than his morally abstemious and openly reactionary enemies...

...he does not try (it's always the temptation) to enumerate them...

...These are exactly the sacrifices that I think ought to be extracted from oneself...

...In a twenty-eight-page wiping, Hitchens marshals an impressive amount of material: Berlin gloried in the company of Realistic Men like McGeorge Bundy, and, explaining his bullishness on Vietnam, referred to himself coyly as "a terrific domino man...

...Still, you can get the sensation, from The Great Gatsby, that the twentieth century is not going to be a feast of reason and a flow of soul...

...Under the Law of Return," he wrote, "I can supposedly redeem myself by moving into the Jerusalem home from which my friend Edward Said was evicted...

...This is a statement that should drive all would-be Hitchenses back to grad school: a librarians' newsletter is decidedly not what one had in mind for the writer's life...

...Which is, I think, the meaning of Bellow's response, as reported by Amis, to Hitchens's explanation that if he'd failed to defend Said, he would have felt bad...

...Hitchens promises, and after stocking up with several bottles of wine—"the Bellows are generous hosts," Amis explains, "and Saul knew John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, but they could have no conception of what they faced here"—they arrive at Bellow's home...

...that even in the sanctuary of his literary criticism, Utility, that winged chariot bound for oblivion, is ever waiting for Hitchens outside the door...

...he misunderstood Marx and twisted Kant...

...His prose has thickened, so that even in the longest of these essays his points feel undigested...

...When he does practice sympathy, as in the essay here on Whittaker Chambers, he is a powerful writer...

...The critic George Scialabba summed up this tension perfectly some years ago in an assessment of Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn...

...Unlike earlier public intellectuals, they have not written for the ages, but for present efficacy...

...I would have felt bad...

...When, ninety minutes later, Hitchens is finished, there is an uncomfortable silence...

...But are Eliot's poetry and prose hopelessly infected...

...For occasionally, even now, one catches glimpses of the writer he might have become...

...Hitchens often takes this too far...

...For eight years Hitchens has with mounting fury documented the slippery slope of realism's latest, Clintonian manifestation, from the campaign-dictated execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a lobotomized convict who left the pecan pie from his last meal "for later," to the Monicagate-dictated rocketing of a medicine factory in Sudan...

...UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATION: WRITERS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE by Christopher Hitchens Verso, 2000, 358 pp $25 0 N THE FIFTH floor of Harvard's Lamont Library, near the men's room, there is an old, well-thumbed volume of Dwight Macdonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist...

...Better, that is, than thinking tribally, "with the blood...

...The chariot patrols the margins...

...But this too is false, for Hitchens's friendship crosses party lines and even lines of honor— he is not above being friendly with men he considers scoundrels...

...THIS DISCONNECT is at least partially a choice that Hitchens has made...

...Reading these essays, one is struck by their wit, erudition, their apposite historical memory...

...It cannot be, as it initially seems, a short-hand form of full disclosure, because Hitchens is friends with everyone: so either all his journalism is tainted by his contacts or none is...

...KErm GESSEN is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...In short, fighting his protracted war against the mainstream's willful amnesia and smug maturity, Hitchens has allowed his methods to become unsound...

...There he stands," Hitchens sums up a long quote from Tom Wolfe, "in all his vulgarity" Responding to Saul Bellow's claim that he was making fun of, rather than practicing pedantry in Herzog: "Well, taking things all in all, I think we had better be the judge of that...

...But something is missing...

...As a persona, Hitchens is less subtle...

...Our literary critics do not write this way, it smacks too much of politics...

...To neglect this is to lose a great deal...

...Of course he was...

...And the price they have accepted in all seriousness will be exacted: their writings will not live...

...yet another bitter memoir from Norman Podhoretz...

...We live in ugly times, Scialabba wrote, but were it not for the everyday vigilance of Chomsky and Cockburn they would be uglier still: "And that, I imagine, will be the common form of epitaph for the new public intellectuals...

...when he fails to, which is much of the time, it mars his every word...

...Far too often he disdains to do necessary narrative work, and occasionally he proceeds by innuendo or sins by omission...

...This is very fine, and it exhibits a rare negative quality: Hitchens alludes to the crimes through their opposite...

...And this question, I think, brings the Hitchensian conundrum into focus: it would be nice to ignore the likes of Podhoretz, but their deceptions are piling up...

...But it describes, in a weird way, the work that Hitchens does, and the remarkable quantity of his output...

...The "choice of comrades," as Ignazio Silone once called it, must also determine where we stand...

...The rebuttal and prolepsis are his weapons, the strategic elision his opportunity, the uncomfortable historical fact his ammunition...

...But then: why hasn't ours...

...And if I hadn't defended him...

...For Hitchens as a writer is the consummate marginaliaist...

...But Edward [Said] is a friend of mine...

...My friend Michael Kinsley," "my friend Gail Sheehy," and, always, "my friend Alexander Cockburn" (formerly)—it is a rhetorical construction one encounters almost pathologically in Hitchens...

...the deification of Isaiah Berlin...

...But Hitchens's ability to read politics as moral drama opens him to insights that most of his colleagues cannot approach—such as his observation from last August about the problem with Al Gore: "There is a subliminal reason why people do not care for Gore...

...He is too promiscuous with his indignation, so that it loses much of its force...

...About halfway through dinner he launches into an extended harangue, which eventually ceases to encounter any resistance, on the subject of Israel: its deceptions, messianic pretensions, its violations of international laws...

...Writing in a previous collection about learning, in middle age, that his mother was Jewish, Hitchens argued that he could not let this affect what he believed...

...And this same relationship is expressed, less obviously, in Hitchens's writing...

...My friend" could also be an epithet, Hitchens helpfully tagging the animals in the intellectual zoo: "that old coward and fraud," "the little putt," "my friend," "my friend...

...It might even tell you, in a pinch, who your friends really are...

...No...

...But Hitchens's DISSENT / Summer 2001 n I09 BOOKS quoting is of a forensic rather than exegetical nature: he cites only to destroy...

...Hitchens gets in...

...the movement that we see in a great critic like George Orwell toward the person or book he is discussing, and therefore toward a re-examination of his own beliefs, is largely absent from Hitchens...

...He continued: Not that they created monuments of unaging intellect, but that they hemmed in everyday barbarism a little...

...Not a week goes by without Hitchens appearing in some backofthe-book to dispose of another fraud, slander, revisionist misinterpretation...

...what often appears to be a pose of superiority is closer to a sort of critical rootlessness...

...In his literary criticism, too, Hitchens is best when he is interceding rather than interpreting...

...Your reviewer unsheathed his pen upon seeing this, but then read further down the margin, where a knotty, penciled hand had done good work...

...The truth is sooner that, like most people who are friends with everyone, Hitchens is friends with no one...

...It's ad horninem and conjectural, but it captures — the psychological dimension of Gore's poor showing among the white working class...